They Broke the Budget. Now You Can't Use the Bathroom.

If you took your family to Mission Bay this past week, you may have found the restroom locked.

You weren't imagining it. The city just closed 13 of the 28 public restrooms at Mission Bay Park, plus half the portable toilets on Fiesta Island, right at the start of July, when the park is at its absolute busiest.

The City Council approved it unanimously.

Now, when you ask how it came to this, you'll hear the same answer you always hear from City Hall: there was no choice. Costs went up. Sacramento cut back. Times are tough. Nobody could have seen it coming.

That is not true, and every member of that Council knows it.

Here is how San Diego actually went broke.

They spent years balancing the budget with gimmicks instead of decisions. 

Rather than fix a deficit where ongoing costs permanently exceeded ongoing revenue, the Council reached for one-time money, year after year, to make the books look balanced in June. Every one of those patches guaranteed a bigger hole the next year. This is the most basic failure in municipal finance, it was obvious at the time, and they did it anyway.

They let the city fall $8 billion behind on its own infrastructure. 

Not $8 million. Eight billion dollars in deferred maintenance on the roads, pipes, buildings, and parks San Diegans already paid for. That backlog didn't fall out of the sky. It is the accumulated total of every year the Council decided the bill could wait until somebody else was sitting in the chair.

They asked you for a tax increase, you said no, and they charged you anyway. 

When voters narrowly rejected Measure E in 2024, the honest response was to cut the city's cost structure. Instead the Council went hunting for revenue that didn't require your permission: a new trash fee sold to voters at roughly $23 to $29 a month that arrived at as much as $43.60, paid parking in Balboa Park, and a stack of new charges that, according to the city's own reporting, still weren't enough to close the gap.

And when all of that failed, they came for the basics. 

Six libraries lost hours. Thirteen recreation centers went from 60 hours a week to 40. Arts grants gutted. Shelter capacity squeezed. And now the bathrooms at Mission Bay.

Look at the order of operations there. The vacant building came first. The gimmicks came first. The fine print on your trash bill came first. You came last.

That's the whole story of this City Council. Not one catastrophic decision, but a decade of small, comfortable ones: defer the maintenance, take the one-time money, approve the deal, avoid the hard vote, and hand the consequences to whoever comes next. It worked beautifully, right up until it didn't. And the people paying for it are families who just wanted an open restroom at a public park in July.

A budget is a statement of priorities. San Diego's says exactly what this Council believes: that the mistakes of the people in charge get funded first, and the people who pay for them get whatever is left.

They didn't run out of money. They ran out of discipline. And they ran out of it a long time ago.

San Diegans do not ask for much from City Hall. Maintain what we already own. Read the contract before you sign it. Don't ask for a tax, get told no, and then invent a fee. Tell the truth about what things cost, and when the numbers don't work, say so out loud instead of hiding it in a footnote.

That isn't a radical platform. That is the job, and it is being done badly.

Written by Jim Desmond | July 12, 2026 | Desmond for Congress

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